Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford: The Inheritors

Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford: The Inheritors

Conrad and Ford: this has to be one of the strangest collaborations in literary history. Henry James, who knew both, is supposed to have said that the collaboration was like "a bad dream . . . their traditions and their gifts are so dissimilar." At one point, Conrad even rented a farm house owned by Ford. I remember reading somewhere (unfortunately my memory can't come up with specifics) that Conrad had asked someone, perhaps Edward Garnett (who was a close friend of both) to recommend one whom he might work with to improve his English. Conrad's native tongue was Polish, and he later learned French while in the French merchant marine. Ford was recommended; so occurred a strange collaboration that eventually produced two novels and one novella and considerable influence in the writings of both from that point on.

The Inheritors is the first of their collaborations that was published, although Ford had begun work on Romance, which became their second published work. However, Conrad at that time was too busy with Heart of Darkness, so Ford put it aside and began work on "a topical political fantasy" which was eventually called The Inheritors.

The tale is a first person narrative told by Arthur Granger, a struggling young writer who is determined to write literature. However, he struggles to get published and when he is offered a chance to do a number of short political propaganda portraits, he accepts the work, even though he feels it is beneath him. But, in the real world, one needs money. In addition, he, and most importantly, others will see him in print, perhaps making it easier for him to get his serious work in print. One can see his high principles beginning to slip a bit for he now sees himself as part of the real world, that of high stakes politics and business.

He is on his way to do his first "portrait" when he meets a strange young woman who insists she comes from the Fourth Dimension. She and others from the Fourth Dimension have appeared in England with the express purpose of taking control of England and eventually of the world. He goes along with her tale, primarily because he finds her very attractive and eventually falls in love with her.

As Granger travels about, interviewing various important people for his series, he encounters her more often as she begins to insinuate herself in the upper levels of the British ruling class. In fact, she eventually identifies herself as Granger's sister, and besotted as he is, he doesn't deny it. He professes his love for her, but she remains distant, only occasionally meeting him, in order to maintain her control over him. He will be, as she frequently reminds him, useful to her in furthering her plans for domination.

And she is right; she hasn't misjudged her control over him as, at the end, he betrays his friends when he goes along with her plans to bring down the present government. Circumstances had placed him temporarily in control of a politically powerful newspaper, and he does not print an article which would bring all her planning to naught.

[As was pointed out by Anonymous in a comment, I have suffered a mental spasm and reversed the sequence of events. While temporarily in control of the newspaper, Granger allowed an article to be printed which furthered her plans and brought down the government, and incidentally removed his friends from power. ]

Two themes are present in the novel: one is clearly Ford's, for it appears in several of his novels, while the other reminds me of a theme that Conrad brought into a number of his works, but most especially in Heart of Darkness.

In several of Ford's novels, one can easily distinguish the theme of replacement or perhaps displacement of the English ruling class by outsiders. In Ford's tetralogy, Parade's End, set during WWI, Christopher Tietjens, at one point, notes that the ruling classes are doomed and will be replace eventually be technocrats. In The Good Soldier, John Dowell, the American, replaces Edward Ashburnham, the good soldier, at the end, when he takes over Ashburnham's country estate and the care of Ashburnham's ward. This theme of replacement is spelled out very clearly in The Rash Act when an impoverished American takes the place of a wealthy Englishman who has been killed in an auto accident.

In Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Kurz is the head of a trading post. He is supposed to make a profit for the Company by bringing in ivory. But, Kurz also is expected, by many, to civilize the natives. This is the White Man's Burden--to bring the joys of civilization to the benighted and savage members of the human race. In various works, Conrad sarcastically brings up this issue and shows that it's really just an excuse to exploit them, that the whites are far more savage than those they are supposedly enlightening.

In The Inheritors, we learn of the Greenland Project, a project which will enlighten and civilize the Esquimaux. While some have called it exploitation, its founder, Duc de Mersch defends it by pointing out its obvious financial importance to the English, not to speak of "the moral aspect of the work--it was unnecessary. Progress, improvement, civilisation, a little less evil in the world--more light! It was our duty not to count the cost of humanising a lower race."

And later, we learn more about the progress of the Greenland Project: "They had taught the natives to use and to value sewing-machines and European costumes. So many hundred of English younger sons had gone to make their fortunes and, incidentally, to enlighten the Esquimaux--so many hundreds of French, of Germans, Greeks, Russians. All these lived and moved in harmony, employed, happy, free labourers, protected by the most rigid laws."

It is ironic that the failure of the supporters to gain backing by the English government that ultimately brings down the government and brings in those backed by Dimensionist faction, aided, of course, by Arthur Granger's betrayal. At the end, Granger is alone. He has betrayed his friends and she tells him that they must go their separate ways now: "you, yours, and I, mine." She no longer has any use for him.

I wouldn't call The Inheritors one of their best novels. It lacks the depth that I've become accustomed to from each of them. The issues are there, but they haven't been explored to any great degree. I suspect that the collaboration process is at fault here. However, I would recommend it for those interested in something different, something not quite Conrad and not quite Ford, but a little bit of both and a little bit of neither.

Nikos Kazantzakis: Feb. 18, 1885--Oct. 26, 1957

Unlike some, Kazantzakis tells the reader from the beginning that his biography of Saint Francis is partly a creative or imaginative work.

From Kazantzakis' Preface to Saint Francis:

Prologue

"If I have omitted many of Francis' sayings and and deeds and
if I have altered others, and added still others which did not take
place but which might have taken place, I have done so not out of
ignorance or impudence or irreverence, but from a need to match
the Saint's life with his myth, bringing that life as fully into accord
with its essence as possible.

Art has this right, and not only the right but the duty to subject
everything to the essence. It feeds upon the story, then assimilates it
slowly, cunningly, and turns it into a legend.

While writing this legend which is truer than truth itself, I was overwhelmed by love, reverence, and admiration fro Francis, the hero and great martyr. Often large teardrops smeared the manuscript; often a hand hovered before me in the air, a hand with an eternally renewed wound: someone seemed to have driven a nail through it, seemed to be driving a nail through it for all eternity.

Everywhere about me, as I wrote, I sensed the Saint's invisible presence; because for me Saint Francis is he model of the dutiful man, the man who by means of ceaseless, supremely cruel struggle succeeds in fulfilling our highest obligation, something higher even than morality or truth or beauty: the obligation to transubstantiate the matter which God entrusted to us, and turn it into spirit."

Nikos Kazantzakis



I think Ford Madox Ford expressed a somewhat similar opinion when several friends and acquaintances suggested that a number of his reminiscences and stories didn't happen the way he said that they did. Ford responded that he was a writer, not an historian.

Ford Madox Ford: December 17, 1873--June 26, 1939

As I've mentioned before, Ford's The Good Soldier is one of my top ten favorite novels. I find it absorbing each time I read it, for something new always emerges. It's been awhile since I last read it, and I believe I'm due for another read. I wonder what I'll discover this time.

I really enjoy the way Ford slowly introduces information throughout the novel, very quietly and so unobtrusively that I keep missing it. This is one work that must be read slowly and alertly. Something is always going on.

One example from my last reread is the first sentence of the novel: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard."

This is the fourth? fifth? time that I have read this novel, and up to now I have always focused on the words "the saddest story" as being the most important. Now, I'm not so sure. The last word in the sentence, "heard," seems also to be very significant, if not even more so.

"Heard" suggests to me that this is not something that Dowell has been a part of, but a story that someone told him and now he is going to tell us what he heard. Yet, immediately afterwards, he tells us that it is the story of him, his wife Florence, and their English friends, the Ashburnhams. In fact he tells us that they had known these people with "extreme intimacy." This would seem to contradict the implication of his opening statement--that this is something he heard rather than personally experienced. Why does he say "heard" rather than "lived through" or "experienced"?

I think this poses the basic question of the novel: What kind of relationship did Dowell really have with the Ashburnhams?

Dowell is probably one of the most unique narrators I've ever encountered. He is at the same time both a reliable and an unreliable, or really a naive narrator, and this is what creates the tension in the story. The novel is a flashback in which Dowell tells us not only what he thought his life was like, but also what it really was. In doing this he poses the problem: Is what was once thought true, now no longer true?

Looking back on the past ten years, he cries out: "No, by God it is false! It wasn't a minuet that we stepped; it was a prison--a prison full of screaming hysterics, tied down so that they might not outsound the rolling of our carriage wheels as we went along the shaded avenues of the Taunus Wald.

And yet, I swear by the sacred name of my creator that it was true. It was true sunshine; the true music; the true plash of the fountains from the mouths of stone dolphins. For, if for me we were four people with the same tastes, with the same desires, acting--or no not acting--sitting here and there unanimously, isn't that the truth? If for nine years I possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?"

Can one change the past?

It's definitely time to dust off The Good Soldier and move it into my queue.

In the Beginning...

In a recent post I said that a novel written by Thomas H. Cook, Breakheart Hill, had a first line that reminded me of the first line of a favorite novel of mine, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. Ford began his novel with "This is the saddest story I have ever heard," while Cross started with "This is the darkest story that I ever heard."

Several days later, I turned to the first page of another novel and found awaiting me the following: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness..." Of course, Dickens' Tale of Two Cities is a unique novel in that it is the only one that I am aware of that not only has one of the most famous opening sentences in literature, but also one of the most famous endings in literature: it is Sidney Carton's soliloquy that ends the novel: "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."

This set me off thinking about well-known beginnings; just hearing them brings back memories of the works involved. I suspect many of them would be recognized even by people who had never read the texts.

Part of the popularity of these openings is the relationship to the novel. For example, Ford's narrator, Dowell, and Cook's narrator, Ben, tell us that this story is one that they heard. It's as if they also are readers, and not participants as we would expect. What's intriguing about this is the puzzle creates for the reader--just why do Dowell and Ben tell us this is a story they heard?

Another well-known opening, perhaps, some might argue, the most famous in English literature, is "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." I suspect this is more "universally acknowledged" among mothers of marriageable young ladies than it is among single men with good fortunes. And, in Austen's Pride and Prejudice, we see how this works out, with three marriages taking place between the covers of the book. A careful reading will show that actually only one of the single men involved was in want of a wife, and he was the one without a fortune. Perhaps Bingley and Darcy didn't know they were wanting a wife, in the beginning anyway.

Melville's Moby Dick is longer than any of the novels I've mentioned so far, so it is only fitting that it has one of the shortest opening sentences: "Call me Ishmael!" He's being bit evasive here as he says to call him Ishmael, not that his name is Ishmael. In the Bible, Ishmael is the son of Abraham and his wife's servant Hagar. Abraham disowned him and drove both Ishmael and Hagar out into the wilderness when his wife, Sarah, gave birth to Issac. Ishmael now has the meaning of a exile or outcast. Who is Melville's Ishmael?

A opening to a work that I suspect is the most widely read and recognized would be from Genesis--

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2. And the earth was without form, and void: and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3. And God said, Let there be light; and there was light."

Along with being one of the most widely-known opening lines, it is no doubt one of the most influential opening lines.


Novels aren't alone in producing memorable opening statements. Beethoven's opening to his Fifth Symphony is recognized by many who have never heard the entire symphony. And, I wouldn't be surprised if hundreds of people could identify and finish the following opening to a TV show that ran more than forty years ago: "Space. The Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the ..." George Lucas was also well aware of the importance of the opening statement when he began the "Star Wars" series, not with an opening action scene, but with a text message that slowly scrolled its way from the bottom to the top of the screen: "A long time ago in a galaxy far away..." That evoked memories of an opening statement that is almost a cliche: "Once upon a time...," surely the most common opening, in English anyway, for a fantasy tale.

I have a few personal favorites too:

"Whose woods these are I think I know,
His house is in the village though.
He won't see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow."

and

"Awake! For Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that put the stars to flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light."


How about you?

Any favorite openers?

Or, ones that I've forgotten?

Thomas H. Cook: Breakheart Hill

Thomas H. Cook's Breakheart Hill was recommended to me by a friend. This is the first one by him that I've read, and frankly, I probably wouldn't have read it without a recommendation. It's not that I have heard anything about him that would discourage me, but there are so many writers out there that he would most likely have gotten lost in the crowd, without being pointed out to me.

Therefore, when I opened the book, I had no idea of what to expect and was grabbed immediately by the very first sentence. The novel begins, "This is the darkest story that I ever heard." I was instantly reminded of one of my favorite novels, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, which begins "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." Coincidence? And, as I read the novel, I couldn't help but wonder if Cook had read Ford's novel.

Both novels are first person narratives in which the narrator looks back on his life and on the lives of those around him. Both narrators tell the story not in a chronologically coherent manner but wander back and forth, from the present to the past and then to the present again, and somehow at the end do manage to get the story told. Both writers employ the first person narrative to give the work a claustrophobic air by suggesting that there is so much more to be told, but the reader is trapped inside the head of a narrator who either doesn't understand what is going on until it is all over (Ford's novel) or chooses not to tell all he knows (Cook's novel). In addition, both novels focus on the actions of a small group of people and the way each affects the others in the group.

While there are structural similarities between the two novels, they are still quite different. Cook may have been influenced by Ford when he decided on the narrative structure and the opening sentence, but this is where the similarity ends. Dowell, Ford's narrator, knows nothing of what is going on around him. The relationships of his wife, and their best friends, the Ashburnhams, and the transient members of their little group, escape him completely. Consequently, he is unable to see the impending tragedy until he is confronted by it. On the other hand, Ben, Cook's narrator, frequently tells the reader that he alone knows the full story, and that he has spent the past 30 years making sure it never gets out, at least by him, anyway. The reader can only wonder why, and speculate.

Breakheart Hill is aptly named. It is the story of the events leading up to and resulting from a murderous attack on a teen-aged girl which took place on the appropriately named Breakheart Hill, just outside of the small town of Choctaw, Alabama. It is this event that has haunted the narrator and his friends for the past thirty years, and it is clear that her life wasn't the only one that was ultimately destroyed, or damaged in some way. At the end, I could only wish that she hadn't submitted that poem, or that Ben had not agreed to become the editor of the school paper, for it is a story about small and seemingly insignificant events and their unintended and unimagined consequences.

I'm not giving anything away when I say that the central question throughout the work is the narrator's involvement in the crime. It is, to me, the most significant element of the novel. This question arises in the first chapter:


"And yet there are times when I do hear certain things very distinctly: her body plunging through the undergrowth..."

"From time to time, though rarely, I actually hear her voice. It is faint, but persistent. Sometimes it comes in the form of a question: Why are you doing this to me?"


Elsewhere, he says that he can see her eyes raised to him in confusion and bewilderment.

And, it is clear that others, including Luke, his best friend of 30+ years, look at him suspiciously. Or, is that only his guilty conscience at work?

Throughout the work, I considered three possibilities: 1) he is guilty; 2) he is indirectly responsible; or 3) he has deluded himself into blaming himself for it. Cook skillfully encourages this by Ben's numerous, ambiguous reflections on past events that could support all three possibilities, and probably a fourth that I didn't see.

Breakheart Hill is not an action-oriented, page-turner. It moves deliberately, as the narrator slowly unveils the events that inexorably lead up to Breakheart Hill. It is not to be read in small portions--a page or two hastily in a few spare moments--but in large chunks, free from distractions.

Overall Rating: Highly recommended.

Ford Madox Ford: December 17, 1873 – June 26, 1939

Born on this day in 1873 is one of my favorite novelists, Ford Madox Ford. His novel The Good Soldier is permanently installed in my top ten favorite novels list. His WWI tetralogy Parades End is one that I have read several times and will continue to reread regularly.

His importance or effect on English literature is not limited to the works he himself wrote. The following is a quote from the Wikipedia entry:

"In 1908, he founded The English Review, in which he published Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, John Galsworthy, and William Butler Yeats, and gave debuts to Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, and Norman Douglas. In the 1920s, he founded The Transatlantic Review, a journal with great influence on modern literature. Staying with the artistic community in the Latin Quarter of Paris, France, he made friends with James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Jean Rhys, all of whom he would publish (Ford is the model for the character Braddocks in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises). In a later sojourn in the United States, he was involved with Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Porter and Robert Lowell (who was then a student). Despite his deep Victorian roots, Ford was always a champion of new literature and literary experimentation."

His collaboration with Joseph Conrad produced two novels, Inheritance, a novel about aliens from another dimension who are gradually taking control of England, and Romance, a swashbuckling novel set mostly in the Caribbean and features pirates, buried treasure, damsels in distress, and last minute rescues. Apparently it was made into a film in 1927 under the title of The Road to Romance, starring Ramon Navarro. Ford and Conrad also collaborated on a shorter work, The Nature of a Crime, a work I believe neither could have written alone. In fact, Conrad later denied having even heard of the work and was convinced of his part in it only when Ford showed him drafts in Conrad's handwriting.

If you haven't read it yet, I would strongly recommend reading at least Ford's The Good Soldier. I would also recommend Parades End and various works by Conrad, including their collaborations.